Pages

Friday, June 25, 2010

As For the Content of the Video.... Part 2

Next in the video they mention Einstein's Theory of general relativity, and the origin of the Big Bang theory. Explaining briefly at a high-school science level the Doppler effect and Edwin Hubble's discovery of the universal red-shift. They commit several fallacies and attempt to ridicule the non-theistic view of the Big Bang as it was back when it was first conceived. A lot of what they say is not wrong, just simplified, but every now and then they add in something about god, or a quote from someone mentioning something like "If you're religious, it's like looking at god". None of these quotes really holds any weight as an argument for a theistically caused big bang though. It's just an appeal to emotion and an appeal to authority.

After finishing explaining a several decade-old version of the big bang theory, they replay the opening sequence of the Strauss piece again, and some text comes up. The text is a version of the Kalam Cosmological argument, which goes something like this.

Everything that begins to exist has a cause

The universe began to exist.

The universe has a cause.

This argument is most famously used by the professional debater/apologist William Lane Craig. The argument falls flat on its face with the first premise, and then is squashed by the steamroller of reason at the second premise.
The first premise has never been established to be true in any sense, and in fact with the current state of quantum physics, it appears that quantum particles jump in and out of existence all the time with no apparent cause. Needless to say, 'beginning to exist' is something that has never been observed, and in fact violates the first law of thermodynamics.
The second premise is stated as a fact by creationists, but does not reflect the reality of current scientific views regarding the big bang. There is nothing within big bang theory to suggest that the universe began to exist, or that at some point it didn't exist. Regardless, we currently have no way of examining anything that happened 'before' the big bang.

2 comments:

It is ironic that the very things we do see "beginning" to exist in some sense (if we count quantum particles) is that the are, as far as we can tell, uncaused. Dr. Craig knows this and yet continues to spew his favorite little irrelevant "proof" of God. That seems to be the case for most apologists though - even once their "proofs" have been discounted, keep using them because some people may still be convinced. Shameful.

That's why I can't stand people like Dr. Craig, he's just so deceitfully smug. Even if he was absolutely thrashed in a debate where they tore every piece of his argument to shreds, he would continue to use the same arguments at his next public speaking engagement (which would probably be the next day, since he's a professional speaker)